Away In a Manger​ (Try it for free!) Blue Christmas​ Christmas Time Is Here Deck the Halls Frosty the Snowman​ Go Tell It On the Mountain​ Hark the Herald Angels Sing Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas​ I’ll Be Home for Christmas​ It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year​ Jingle Bells

Away In a Manger​ (Try it for free!) Blue Christmas​ Christmas Time Is Here Deck the Halls Frosty the Snowman​ Go Tell It On the Mountain​ Hark the Herald Angels Sing Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas​ I’ll Be Home for Christmas​ It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year​ Jingle Bells

Away In a Manger​ (Try it for free!) Blue Christmas​ Christmas Time Is Here Deck the Halls Frosty the Snowman​ Go Tell It On the Mountain​ Hark the Herald Angels Sing Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas​ I’ll Be Home for Christmas​ It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year​ Jingle Bells

Beg​​inner = Mainly Major and Minor ChordsAdvanced = All Chords​​

Away In a Manger​ (Try it for free!) Blue Christmas​ Christmas Time Is Here Deck the Halls Frosty the Snowman​ Go Tell It On the Mountain​ Hark the Herald Angels Sing Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas​ I’ll Be Home for Christmas​ It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year​ Jingle Bells

Away In a Manger​ (Try it for free!) Blue Christmas​ Christmas Time Is Here Deck the Halls Frosty the Snowman​ Go Tell It On the Mountain​ Hark the Herald Angels Sing Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas​ I’ll Be Home for Christmas​ It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year​ Jingle Bells

Away In a Manger​ (Try it for free!) Blue Christmas​ Christmas Time Is Here Deck the Halls Frosty the Snowman​ Go Tell It On the Mountain​ Hark the Herald Angels Sing Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas​ I’ll Be Home for Christmas​ It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year​ Jingle Bells

Wanted to share to bless – this is a great old song!

One of the biggest dangers (and I have done it myself) in learning to play is the DANGER OF FALLING INTO A RUT.

What is a RUT?

A rut is where you play the SAME THING, EVERY TIME you sit down to play at the piano (or your instrument of choice).

You sit down and just play around with what you know. And you go in circles. Every time. Sometimes for years…or your whole life! 🙁

SO HOW DO YOU BREAK OUT OF THIS?

First of all, “if you want to really play, don’t just play around.”

I mean, that’s cool sometimes and part of it.

But you need to FOCUS. You need to LEARN SOMETHING NEW.

If you don’t, then you will just stay where you are at…forever.

I personally still take lessons. I will learn from anyone – even a 5 year old.

One of the greatest musician mentors I ever had – O’neal Wright from New Life Tabernacle in Tampa, Florida told me this “You can learning SOMETHING from ANYBODY.”

I never forgot that.

Shameless plug here – Apostolic Praise Lessons will give you focus. Our lessons are specifically designed and have been tested to teach people how to play more quickly, more easily, and have more fun doing it.

And FUN is super-important! You have to learn to enjoy playing. I mean it is called “playing.” 🙂

But notice the saying doesn’t go “If you want to really play, DON’T play around”.

NO! It says “If you want to really play, don’t JUST play around.

You can play around and have fun (in fact this is the SECOND most important thing to do).

But the FIRST most important thing is to FOCUS and LEARN SOMETHING NEW.

If you get 1% better everyday, in just one year you will be 365% better.

I can take a complete beginner and if they complete just ONE Apostolic Praise Lesson per week. In one year, they will have gone from playing NOTHING (or just major and minor chords) to playing songs and advanced concepts like 11th and 13th chords and fast song walking bass lines with praise vamps!

P.S.S Are you wanting to help get your church, youth or family band going?! Your answer is here!

The new Apostolic Praise Beginner Band Package includes the first Apostolic Praise course for each instrument (piano, bass, drums, guitar and organ). Each 12 lesson course teaches many important concepts with each concept being backed up by a real church song or two! This series will give your musicians a huge boost of confidence, a completely new sound, and it will help you to understand how music actually works while also teaching you the tricks to play by ear.

The new Apostolic Praise Beginner Band Package is available as online lessons OR DVD or USB with workbooks and practice CDs (each option comes with Lifetime Online Access too)!

We are so excited that the first TEN people who take advantage of this will get an extra 30% off with free shipping (and these package deals are already discounted 33% off so this is like 30% plus another 30% off – AND free shipping!)

Wanted to share to bless!

I remember first learning to piano (keyboard – same thing). I was six years old and there was a lightning storm that had turned off the power so I asked my mom to teach me how to play.

See, God sends us storms for a reason sometimes!

Well, I was really just bored and there was nothing else to do. It was too dark to read or play and I didn’t want to go to bed, but I could see the piano keys by the light of the candles! LOL

I have always loved that bluesy, jazzy, gospel-y kind of sound and I tried to learn it out of books. I also took a lot of classical piano lessons with a sweet lady down the road.

But let me tell you, I still couldn’t PLAY!

You know what I mean…PLAY!

Like just sit down at the piano or keyboard and just JAM (or worship) for Jesus!

There had to be a secret! More practice? REALLY?! I had practiced for HUNDREDS and THOUSANDS of hours.

A lot of people just say “PRACTICE more. And there’s no shortcut! Just PRACTICE more!”

Well I can practice playing C major scale and my classical pieces backwards and forwards for 10,000 hours but that wasn’t going to teach me how to PLAY.

So there had to be something more…

Well, it took me 10+ long years of hunting and digging around until I finally learned the secrets to playing like I wanted to.

My goal is to shorten that path for you and give you the tools you need to be playing REAL church songs by your very first lesson (AP 100 Lesson 1).

I’ve taught hundreds of in-person LIVE music lessons and through teaching for years, I developed a system that teaches people how to start playing quickly without having to take YEARS of piano lessons.

But the system only works if YOU work too (and actually do the lessons and practice them).

Make it a goal to complete ONE lesson per week and in one year you will be able to play almost anything.

Just wanted to share to bless. Enjoy!

I remember when I was learning to play music and I had these big books of chords that would show me how to play every chord out there in every key. I would try to memorize them and play them, but they sounded so funny. What a waste of time that was! I could play them, but I had no idea how to use them or where to put them in a song! Eventually I just forgot them.

You see, there’s so much more to playing music than just learning chords – although chords are important!

Here are the 12 keys (you see what I did there – 12 keys) to learning to play:

1) The Notes (of course right) – both Sharps and Flats

2) Scales (And the major scale is just one of many, there are the Blues Scale, Minor Scales, Pentatonic Scales, Whole Tone Scales, Diminished Scales, Altered Scales, and the list goes on!)

3) Chords (There are around 30+ that we teach and use in gospel and church music)

4) Chord Progressions (Where you can plug in those hot progressions that make a song better!)

5) Chord Substitutions (Where you can substitute a fat chord to make a song sound better!)

6) Fills and Runs (Little tricks that you pick up along the way such as grace notes, octave chord fills, broken chord fills, etc – we teach many fills and runs even in our first course AP 100)

7) Inversions (One of the most important things to learn! Because who wants to play a chord the same way every time?! That’s boring, right?)

8) Chord Voicings (These will train your ear and and help you to play melody also.)

9) Ear Training (both chord, chord progressions, and melodies)

10) The Roman Numeral System (This is how the professionals think and communicate about music – it’s also one of the keys to playing by ear for most of us non-perfect pitch people).

11) Songs (All of these things are important and they are what help us to make songs sound better. But it’s not all about just learning songs either. If you just learn songs and never learn the other stuff…that’s not really good either! You may be limited in your playing.

12) Sight-Reading (It’s still a good thing to know how to do – but not necessary to play church and gospel music).

And the AWESOME news? We teach all of these things in our courses and throughout our lessons, using a systematic way of learning that we developed over years of teaching students.

Just wanted to share this old school song chord sheet to bless!

Just wanted to share this with you! You know, I have taught a lot of students over the years and I felt like I should share two of the biggest ENEMIES that will keep you from reaching your music potential and from you being the best musician and music minister you can be…

MUSICIAN ENEMY NUMBER ONE – DELAY This one is pretty obvious. I’ll just practice later. I’ll do read or watch my next Apostolic Praise lesson later. OR I’m just going to check the news or social media real quick (yeah right). Or I’ll pick it back up next season or next year. (And sometimes you have to do that!) But many times it’s just DELAY. Don’t let DELAY stop you!

Instead, replace it with NOW! I’m going to practice NOW. I’m going to learn a new lesson every week or every day at this time. I’m going to practice 10 minutes a day or 20 minutes a day or 30 minutes or 2 hours – whatever it is – just practice NOW. 🙂

MUSICIAN ENEMY NUMBER TWO (Part 1): Perfectionism

This can strike in two ways. The first one is you practice and practice and practice the same lesson over and over again and never move past it to the other lessons.

TIPS to get around this are as follows: Don’t worry about mastering a lesson 100% before you move on to the next one. Our lessons are structured in such a way that you are going to continue to practice the SAME THINGS but in DIFFERENT WAYS as you go through the courses. This will help you to master them over time. Instead, just try to get the lesson at about a 6 or 7 out of 10 (and you can always go back to review if you need to – you probably won’t have to).

MUSICIAN ENEMY NUMBER TWO (Part 2): Perfectionism

The second one is you have practiced for hours but you refuse to play in church or ministry because you are afraid you might mess up.

TIP: You ARE going to mess up. But that’s ok! I mess up all the time and people think I’m a PRO! In fact, I did a run on Sunday morning and did it in the completely wrong place. It didn’t sound ANYTHING like I wanted it to. The FUNNY part? Several people commented HOW COOL that exact run sounded (including my pastor).

Don’t be afraid to mess up. What that really is, is PRIDE. Rebuke that in Jesus name and go out and be a blessing to HIS kingdom!